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The Act of Killing: Berlin screens film about Indonesias purges

A documentary about the brutal Communist purges in Indonesia under
dictator Suharto will premiere in Berlin this weekend before it heads
towards Asia in March.

Since it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last year The Act of
Killing has inspired debate on social media around the impact of the
1965 mass killings, while raising questions about the governance of
modern Indonesia.

Film festival accolades were led by luminaries such as renowned
documentary film-maker, Werner Herzog, who said hed not seen a more
powerful, surreal and frightening film in the last decade and called
it unprecedented in the history of cinema.

A scene from The Act of Killing movie.

After the military coup that brought him to power, Suharto set about
wiping out Communist Party supporters through his loyal army and
affiliated paramilitaries.

The film follows a group of former gangsters who were members of
Suhartos paramilitary death squads. Between them, they helped the
army kill more than a million Communists, ethnic Chinese and
intellectuals in less than a year following the military coup of 1965.

Shot over the course of seven years, The Act of Killing hones in on
two ringleaders, Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry, who went from selling
black market movie theatre tickets to interrogating and murdering
hundreds of innocent people.

Director Joshua Oppenheimer recruited the men, all fans of genre movies,
to star in their own production about their crimes: they wrote their own
scripts, and played the roles of themselves and their victims.

In one scene Anwar dances on a rooftop where he killed dozens of
innocent people using razor wire. His friend, Adi, chuckles in disbelief
as he describes a killing spree where he stabbed dozens of Chinese
people in one street before attacking the father-in-law of his Chinese
girlfriend.

As each of the perpetrators relive their gruesome past  through their
film  the consequences become severe.

The film also parades some uncomfortable realities about modern
governance in Indonesia  everyday corruption, vote rigging  ministers,
paramilitaries and governors all have jaw-dropping walk-on parts,
shaking hands with the former death squad members and lauding their work
as a national duty.

Those who took part in the killings were widely seen as having done
Indonesia a service, however repulsive they might be as individuals,
says Australian National Universitys Professor Robert Cribb, an expert
in the Communist purges in Indonesia.

He says that some kind of legal reckoning or reconciliation process 
which the film touches on  would be near impossible to enact.

Basically the killers were part of something bigger and that something
bigger had two (or more) sides. Im not sure that a legal reckoning now
would be anything more than another kind of victors justice, he says.

Every possible action  including inaction  has pretty serious moral
complications, and I really dont see a simple solution in Indonesias
case.

2012 was a vintage year for documentaries with standouts such as The
Imposter and Searching for Sugarman, both shortlisted for this
months Oscars.

The Act of Killing will be eligible for next years Oscars and after its
European premiere this weekend it will be making its way back to Asia
with strong support from Indonesians, who have been waiting for the
truth to come out.

The Communist purges have never been publicly discussed in Indonesia.
School children dont learn about the events of 1965, textbooks depict
the killings as the work of patriots that resulted in less than 80,000
deaths.

Currently all films for public distribution in Indonesia are vetted by
the national censorship board, but fans of The Act of Killing have
been behind its word-of-mouth success.

Audiences have attended invite-only screenings at small venues around
the country; they also rallied when its website mysteriously went down
earlier in the year.

Screenings of the documentary have been lined up in Singapore and the
Hong Kong International Film Festival in March. It will also feature at
the annual Sydney Film Festival in June.
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